Of course a first grader can understand margins. They're not personally involved with the idea and they're probably not seriously depressed. It doesn't seem un

Of course a first grader can understand margins. They're not personally involved with the idea and they're probably not seriously depressed. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that he didn't understand margins. It's difficult to communicate how... decayed... your thinking can become under protracted stress that has gone beyond your ability to cope with. You have a very limited budget of energy you can expend on doing anything in the day, and thinking, especially about things that are unpleasant to think about - like the reason you've lost - is incredibly costly. Basically all you want to do a lot of the time is lie in a dark room and sleep forever. You know how, when you've been going at a program for a while, you can start to find it impossible to hold all the bits you know in your head? It's sort of like that, the number of things you can bring yourself to hold in your head at once nosedives, especially where they're unpleasant. It's not implausible to me that he was mostly operating on cached habit and his thinking resources weren't large enough to stick the concepts together in any more. The poor guy went and offed himself subsequently, after all, he clearly wasn't reasoning with a healthy mind. Whether he did or didn't understand it I don't know, but I can see how he might not have been in a position where he could.